Montreal-based meeting and event sourcing company Planned has raised C$4.7 million (approximately US$3.6 million) in venture capital, the company announced. With C$2.3 million in seed money raised previously at the end of 2018, its total funding comes to C$7 million (approximately US$5.4 million). Inovia Capital, Telegraph Hill Capital and N49P participated in this round.
Planned was founded in 2017 as a provider of available office space with empty rooms and desks for rent, but quickly pivoted to focus on the corporate meetings and event market, co-founder Marc-Antoine Bonin told BTN, building a supplier marketplace for planners in North America. A majority of its 10,000 suppliers are hotels and event spaces, but they also include caterers, equipment companies, audiovisual suppliers, speakers, entertainment, experiences, transportation and event management companies.
"We built our supply and relaunched in 2018 as an Airbnb for event space," Bonin said. "That year, we realized we had a great fit with enterprise companies, so we started to focus exclusively on them."
Between 2018 and the start of 2020, Planned grew rapidly, Bonin said, and worked with planners from about 200 companies, including Google, Michelin, Amazon, EY and Airbnb. The company in 2019 opened new offices in Toronto and New York, and covers about 50 major markets in North America. Planned uses location scouts to find vendors for clients planning events in locations where Planned does not have supplier relationships, at no charge.
Planned offers a free version and an enterprise one. It makes money off the free service by receiving commissions from suppliers on bookings. The enterprise version offers "an admin panel where we give back visibility and control to the manager of the enterprise," Bonin said. "Say you work in a large enterprise and have 25 meeting planners, you want to see where the spend and data is. We charge for that. But the booking features are free."
All vendor payments are made through the Planned platform as well. "Usually, large corporations need to register all their suppliers and go through a purchase order process, we can facilitate that," Bonin said.
With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, sales took a bit of a hit, he added, so the company launched a virtual marketplace in August, providing a source for virtual suppliers.
Planned intends to use the new funding to continue developing new services, such as registration, a request-for-proposals feature, a day-of event app and more.
"We are currently building some of these features and hope to release them in the first half of 2021," Bonin said, adding that during the downtime the pandemic created for the meetings and events industry, the company's users "gave us time and feedback on the products we are building. That was a big plus for us as we have been able to develop the products alongside the customers who are super-knowledgeable in the industry."